My 40th birthday is coming up this Tuesday. These birthdays that end with a zero are landmarks so I figured I should post something. (Plus I realized I haven’t written very many posts here this year.)

I was 34 when I started this blog. That doesn’t seem all that long ago but in some important ways I am a different person now than I was then. That is the beauty and danger of digging into metaphysics and philosophy I think; when you tinker with the very core of your beliefs you are adjusting the lens through which you see the universe. Making changes to the lens through which you see the universe (sometimes called shifting paradigms) is interesting in that it may not have immediate and obvious consequences but it will inevitably have massive long term implications.

I’m reminded of this famous quote attributed to Henry David Thoreau:

For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.

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Currently our survey has 802 responses, but has only picked up about 10 a day for the past week or so. So this is my last pitch. Next week we will take the survey down and start analyzing the results, so if you have anyone you think might be interested in taking the survey, pitch it to them. We really would love to get more participation. Currently our confidence interval is something like +/- 4.5, and it would be great to tighten that up a bit. I guess this is my “Now go and get [others] to partake.” post…

Anyway, thanks to everyone who has taken the survey and to those who have invited friends to participate. It’s been a pretty awesome turn out up to this point, and the results we’ve gathered so far are really interesting. I’m really looking forward to sharing it with you.

To invite friends to take the survey, just pass them this link via whichever method you prefer:

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/271583/lds-survey

Ok, so here is our new survey, which focuses on Mormon culture and beliefs. The triple focus of this survey is to measure faith commitment, church engagement, as well as cultural belief on a variety of topics. The survey is 60 questions in length, and so may take as long as 6 minutes to complete. Some of the questions, due to their connection with obscure doctrine, may seem offensive to you. If this is the case, we apologize in advance.

Our goal is to get 5000 responses to this survey, and we will attempt to share this survey via Facebook, this blog, and email invitations. As soon as we feel the responses are no longer coming in, we will prepare our findings and publish them.

To invite friends to take the survey, just pass them this link via whichever method you prefer:

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/271583/lds-survey

Thanks for your participation and support.

I am going to do another Survey soon, but as I have no peers with which to review my question set, I thought I’d pass them by any readers out there for thoughts on the phrasing of the statements.

Each statement will be answers with a Likert scale ranking from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

Statements will be as follows:

There is no contradiction between the theory of evolution and my religious beliefs
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